The spectre of online fraud looms large over all corners of the globe, it seems. Sneak has just read new research published in the Mainichi Shimbun which reports that nearly 50 per cent of Japanese find jumping into the world wide web "makes them feel uneasy". Major reasons included rising levels of ID fraud and malware.

Now there are a lot of things that Japanese citizens should find uneasy, Sneak believes. The ready availability of sexually-explicit manga, the percentage of male academics arrested for taking up-skirt photos of schoolgirls in crowded trains and, um, J-pop, for example. But the internet is not something that sprung to mind.